Three Projects in the New Law and Finance

Abstract This article is a review of Katharina Pistor’s book The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality. Using modern derivatives markets as a case study, it explores the important contributions – and limits – of Professor Pistor’s story about the role of the law and lawyers as the master coders of capitalism. This exploration reveals three distinct projects: a historical coding project, an intellectual decoding project, and a policy-driven recoding project. The fact that these projects are so intricately intertwined posed unique challenges for scholars, but also holds out a potential blueprint for a new law and finance.